The Baxter Letters

by Dolores Hitchens

  I’m too tired. I’ll have to go upstairs and rest for an hour. Then I’ll go down to the basement and hunt up Mr. Keeley in his lair. I hope I can find it. It’s like a maze down there. Pipes. Odd little corridors that lead here and there. She shut her eyes. I can’t face that place right now.

  An inner voice said, You need to know what Mr. Keeley told the police. He might have a warning for you, something very important, and there could be an officer waiting right upstairs now—

  The elevator slid down into view, its moonlike porthole finally matching the porthole behind the grill. The door opened. She punched the button for the basement. The door closed. She leaned against the wall, hugging the old purse and the sack of purchases to keep from dropping them, aware all at once of her feet, of the ache in her arches and the discomfort of runover heels. Shoes, she told herself with a gasp of despair—I have to have new shoes to go to that new office with Mr. Dunavan….

  Won’t the list of what I have to have never end?

  Look at Tom. He’d only needed one thing, the tape recorder. Why couldn’t her needs be simple like that?

  The damned tape recorder had taken almost all of that first big windfall, said the second voice in her mind, the voice that wanted to quarrel and pick fault.

  The elevator was slowing, entering the basement. The first thing you saw when it stopped was a row of six washing machines and six dryers, all in a row against the wall, lit glaringly by fluorescent lights on the low ceiling—and this glare of light, she remembered, always showed at the bottom of the descending elevator door, a brilliant bar that glowed for a moment against the sickly dimness inside the elevator. Only now, it wasn’t glowing. The elevator descended into what must be—her senses snapped alive—stygian dark.

  Her finger flew with involuntary swiftness to the Close button, pressed it, kept the door shut as the elevator creakily settled into the bottom of the shaft. The outside, basement, porthole slid up to match the one in here, and there was just blackness. There were no lights out there at all.

  I won’t go out into utter dark, she told herself. Not after the kind of day this has been. Mr. Keeley could keep those fluorescent bulbs working; even neglecting other things. This basement is too … too tomblike, to go wandering in it in the dark.

  Still keeping her finger on the Close button, she punched the button for her own floor. The elevator made several half-hearted attempts to open up, as if anxious to turn her out into that darkness, but finally in a grumbling way gave up and started to rise again. She sagged against the wall.

  To herself she had made excuses for Mr. Keeley, in the lobby, but there was no excuse at all for this neglect, here in the basement where people had to come to run him down when they needed something.

  Tom was on the couch, stretched out in a robe and socks, listening to Debussy on the tape machine. When Jennifer came in he stretched, sat up, turned off the machine. His hair looked damp and rumpled as if he might have showered just before she came. The green-topaz eyes turned on her with alert curiosity. “Come here. Let me look at you. My God, you’ve been scared to death! Something chased you on West End Avenue in broad daylight?”

  He folded her against him, she crouched on her knees, letting the purse and the parcels drop; and it was true, he had just showered, there was a fresh-soap smell and the strength of his arms was like the sheltering of timbers. Big Tom. Wonderful Tom. Her Tom.

  “You’re shaking and shivering, Jeff!”

  “Yes. Tired. But even more—I wanted to speak to Mr. Keeley, find out what he had told the police about Mr. Shima, whether he had had to mention Mr. Shima’s asking for me. About me, I mean. Only when I went down to the basement there weren’t any lights. None at all. Nothing.”

  “You didn’t wander around down there in the dark, surely?”

  “I didn’t even let the elevator door open.”

  “There is just no excuse for Keeley,” Tom said. “Sure, there’s a hell of a lot to do here. But I don’t see signs of his doing much of anything. Somebody’s got to make the effort, get a bunch of tenants together, find out who owns this wreck and go in a body—or at least armed with a petition and signatures—and make a hell of a row. Threaten to go to the Mayor, or somebody.” While he spoke, Tom pulled off her jacket and began to unbutton her blouse. With the blouse discarded, he pulled down the top of her slip and ran his hands across her skin, his touch warm and light and yet with a tingle like that of frost. He began with swift tenderness to kiss her throat and shoulders. She let herself lean against him dreamily. He reached around to unsnap the bra, then loosened it slowly, little by little, from her breasts. Jennifer shut her eyes; breath seemed to have stopped though her heart was pounding. In spite of exhaustion and recent fright, the memory of the day’s strangeness, she began to stir to meet his passion.

  “Tom—”

  “Jeff, darling.”

  “Let’s go in the bedroom.”

  “Nuh-hunh. Here. On velvet.”

  She pulled free for a moment to unzip the skirt, feeling drugged with desire. This was the wonderful part of being married, she thought; there were no limits, no stop-signs, no barriers and no boundaries. Love was complete. All that you had ever dreamed of had been put right into your hands.

  The whole world. The pumpkin had been changed into a marriage bed. The prince was right beside you. The barefoot country know-nothing lay dazzled by his glory—she, too, transformed….

  “I’m not really that silly thing you picked up at the concert,” she whispered against Tom’s bare warm shoulder. “Not any more.”

  “You better be.” He was rough and yet tender. “I won’t have any changes made around here.”

  It reminded her fleetingly of something else, or almost of something else, but now there was no time to think, to pin it down.

  She was wearing an old terrycloth housecoat, barefooted, standing in the kitchen and examining with dismay the miserable contents of the refrigerator, when Tom came in tying the belt of his robe. “Tell me about this guy Fallon,” he said.

  Between sniffing leftovers, she told him about Fallon—“He’s terribly pukka sahib, old boy,”—and the watchful anonymous Sara, and Baron, who had seemed to make more sense than anybody. “She wanted me to take sugar in the tea. She got all funny when I didn’t want it. She held the bowl out toward me forever. Mr. Fallon had to tell her to take it back.”

  “Sara, not the dog?”

  “Poor Sara. If ever I met anyone who could claim Poor as the first part of her name, it’s this one. And Baron is a he. And then all at once Mr. Fallon wanted Sara to run off and make me some special cup of tea. Something rare and different. And I had to tell them I was expected back at work, so no thanks. I didn’t like those two people. There was something funny going on. It was like when I was a kid and two other kids made up some kind of joke, and I wasn’t told, I just had to blunder along. You know.”

  “It sounds to me as if they were just trying to be very, very pleasant in a transplanted-pukka-sahib kind of way.”

  “Well, they weren’t,” she decided.

  “You think Fallon is genuine? Really English, old top, and all that?”

  She thought about Mr. Fallon. “I guess so. I can’t remember any slips, any inconsistencies. Are you thinking he should resemble Mr. Shima who was vaguely of the mysterious East?”

  “Yes. And I can’t help speculating as to what the other two are like, the second team of Uncle Bax’s penpals. Are we to have a rainbow of exotic people? And all different?”

  “I don’t think I want to deliver any more letters.” She dumped containers of old creamed cauliflower and canned stew, both past using. The back of the refrigerator, where things got behind each other and hid in odorous confusion, was frightening.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t, then, baby.” He put out his arms, turned her to him, ran a hand into her hair and levered up her face to meet his. After a moment he said, “Perhaps if there are more to be delivered, I take on the chores? How about it? I
owe you. I’m going to admit, dammit, I loaned that missing money to Sean. He’s in a bind on his rent, and at the same time he has a possible assistant professorship in the works—drama, and quite a decent little school. If he swings the job his troubles are over, his debts will be paid with grateful interest. And I really do owe him tremendously for what he’s given me—”

  “It’s fine, darling. Don’t worry about it.” She leaned her forehead against Tom’s chin. This kind of time, this afterwards-time, was the precious time when everything that was honest and strong came out in their relationship. When all doubts were ended, when any misunderstandings were cleared away. A warm, loving interval….

  “I should have admitted it this morning.”

  “Don’t think about it any more. I hope that Sean gets just what he wants. He’s been a good friends of yours.”

  Tom held her, rubbed her hair against his face for a moment longer, and then with sudden practicality demanded, “What are we going to eat?”

  “I … I’ll look in the freezer section.”

  “I looked in it for lunch, and it’s empty.”

  Tiredness returned, washed through her, took away the warmth and the sense of protection and completeness. She tried to conjure up some idea of dinner, something that wouldn’t involve getting dressed again and going out to the delicatessen. Her feet hurt—still did, and the thought of shoes made her cringe.

  “Canned stuff again?” he wondered.

  She felt his arms drop; he went to the cupboard, yanked the door wide. “You should have brought some snacks from Mr. Fallon’s tea,” Tom said. “Asked them for a doggie bag. Filled it up.”

  “Isn’t that a can of corned beef hash?”

  “So soon?” Tom yelped. “It hasn’t been three days!”

  She gripped the sink and closed her eyes. The memory of the frantic day spun past like a jerky oldtime movie, flickering glimpses of herself in the lobby of Mr. Fallon’s apartment, blown and shabby, and Sara’s secretive eyes, and the elevator wanting to open on that darkness in the cellar; it all piled up, and she was struck with an insane need to cry. Mr. Keeley would be wondering why she hadn’t stopped to see him. He’d been very decent in his reasoning as to what the cops might have to know about Mr. Shima’s connection with this building. With one of its tenants—

  “Jeff.” Tom had caught her up, was squeezing her hard, so hard that she could scarcely breathe. “Tears. My God, I’m a beast. Of course we’ll have the hash. We’ll jazz it up with some minced onion—there’s an onion here somewhere. And a fried egg on top. And there’s a package of soup mix, some kind, and who would ask for anything more? We’ve already had dessert.”

  He kissed her. Somebody knocked on the door.

  The man at the door was a police officer. He carefully identified himself to Tom before entering the apartment. Tom seemed perfectly relaxed in socks and robe, but in the kitchen Jennifer clutched her mouth and moaned. What did you do when a cop came and you were in an old robe plus nothing? And no way to get invisibly through to the bedroom where your clothes were?

  Tom settled it. “Jeff, come in here. We have an official visitor. He’s come about Mr. Shima.”

  She was supposed to call Mr. Dunavan, let him call his friend in the police force—

  Her head hurt.

  Tom had come to the entrance to the kitchen. “You’ll have to excuse us,” he said over his shoulder to the policeman parked in the living room. “We were relaxing.”

  The cop muttered something intended to be reassuring. Jennifer crossed the miserable old robe across her middle as tightly as it would go. There was nothing she could do about her bare legs. She crept off behind Tom, tried to hide behind him until she could tuck herself in a chair. The cop was sitting on the couch; he wore a uniform and he looked big, pleasant, and friendly.

  He stood briefly as Jennifer ducked her head at him in passing. Tom told her his name, but she missed it. She wished that she could crawl under the corner of the rug.

  The officer took out a notebook and a stubby pencil. “Mr. and Mrs. Burch? Thomas Burch?”

  “Right,” Tom replied. Tom was at the other end of the couch, legs crossed. Jennifer had pushed herself as far back into the big chair as she could get, tucked her feet under.

  “We’re going through the building, apartment by apartment, talking to everybody,” the officer said. “Sometimes people won’t speak up, won’t volunteer anything, unless you go right to them. We’re hoping somebody might have been looking out of a window on the night this Mr. Shima died. You know, people do look out of windows, and they don’t always tell what they’ve seen.”

  Tom nodded. “I guess no one will ever forget that case where thirty-odd people watched while the girl was knifed to death. Watched, and that was all. But I’m afraid we won’t be of any help. For one thing we’re pretty far from the street up here. And for the second, we were out that evening. We went to a play. When we got home the lobby had people in it, and a lot of excited talk, but the man himself had already gone in the ambulance. And we didn’t stay down there to get any details. We were tired. We came right up.”

  This is the time, Jennifer thought. If Mr. Keeley has told the police about Mr. Shima’s asking about me, it’s going to come out now. The officer’s bent head reflected the lamplight; he had fair shining hair and a lock of it fell forward over his hairline. He wrote slowly and meticulously in the notebook.

  Tom asked, “Have you found anyone so far who might have witnessed the attack?”

  The cop hesitated; perhaps debated a moment about how much he was supposed to give out, and then said, “As far as I know, we haven’t. And as you say, the higher we go the farther we are from the street, and the less people could see even if they were looking out.”

  “You think he was knifed in the street, staggered into the lobby for help?”

  “Well, there seem to be several different versions of what did happen. You know what eye-witnesses are like. But the thing they’re agreed on is that he walked into the lobby in a … a kind of state of shock.”

  “Walked in?”

  “Staggered. One witness says he’s sure he came in hanging on to the walls. The lobby’s pretty big, but even so they would have seen anyone tackle him there. He was hit in the street. He had no connection with the building that we can find, had never lived here, didn’t know any of the tenants. So it seems it was a random, desperate reach for help.”

  “Poor devil.”

  “I hope we get to the bottom of it,” the officer said, and shut the notebook.

  When he had gone, the door closed behind him, Jennifer sprang from the chair. “We should have told him. About the letter. About Mr. Shima coming here that day you saw him—”

  “No, baby. With a cop you fly in a perfectly straight line. You answer his questions. You give just the facts—the facts he asks for. You don’t make any detours to examine an Iowa conscience.

  “We lied though. By not speaking up, we lied.”

  “How do you know we lied?” Tom demanded, ruffling her hair. “How do you know that Uncle Bax’s crazy letter had anything to do with what happened to the wog? You didn’t hear the cop explaining everything he knew, did you? Like Mr. Shima being a blackmailer and a genuine all-around rat? Come on, let’s doctor our canned hash and heat the soup.”

  But in bed, in the dark, with Tom’s steady breathing the only sound, she thought some more about Mr. Shima. Her memory recreated that scene of their only meeting. Mr. Shima had opened the Manila envelope and when he had seen Uncle Bax’s writing he had seemed terribly afraid, astonished and unbelieving, like an animal that senses an overwhelming danger. He had asked her if there were other letters.

  Now that was something to think about.

  She thought about it.

  These people whose names were on the envelopes … Four of them. Mr. Shima. Mr. Theogenio Fallon. Mr. Coulter. Mrs. Kate Appleton. They were some kind of a group. Something bound them together, they’d been somewhere, done som
ething, been caught up in a common activity, in the past. They weren’t, she decided, just scattered old friends with whom Bax now wanted to communicate.

  For one thing, Mr. Shima wasn’t anybody’s friend.

  In Tom’s words, he’d been an all-around rat.

  If these four people had all been involved in something together, her thoughts spun out, then they’d have to know each other, and Mr. Shima should have known that there were other letters, and even to whom the other letters would be addressed.

  Could the tie-in have something to do with the people in Uncle Bax’s photographs, the Latin-looking general and the beautiful woman with the crown of black hair?

  She thought with a sudden uneasy start that now, in a way, she herself had become a part of whatever it was. She had delivered the letters, she had met and talked to two of the people in the affair, and so was involved—and though Mr. Shima was dead, Mr. Fallon wasn’t. And he wouldn’t forget her.

  Chapter 9

  Mr. Keeley wasn’t in the lobby, but since she had left earlier than usual in order to get the bus to work, she spent a few precious minutes going to the basement. Mr. Keeley was down there, under the fluorescent lights, tinkering with one of the washing machines. He glanced over his shoulder at her when she stepped out of the elevator.

  “Mr. Keeley, I’m sorry I didn’t have a chance to see you last night,” she apologized. “I came down, but the lights were off, and it seemed terribly dark—”

  He looked irritable, grouchy, the old cap pushed back to show a frowze of dusty hair. There were bracketing sour lines around his mouth. A pimple reddened the center of his chin.

  “I know the lights was off,” he snapped. “I can’t prove it but I’ve got a damn good idea the Winkler kid done it. Rotten hippie. He’s got the notion he can rob these machines for quarters, get himself some money for dope. I caught him down here twice with a screwdriver.”

  “Well, I want to … to thank you,” she stammered.

  The smeared lenses turned up at her as if in inquiry. The guts of the washing machine gave an ominous rumble as he twisted in there with a wrench.